the fourth of the nine children of Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746), a saddler from Memel (now Klaipėda, Lithuania) and his wife, Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), who was from Nuremburg. Kant began to spell his name "Immanuel" after learning Hebrew. His paternal grandfather, Hans Cant, had emigrated to Prussia from Scotland. Kant enrolled at Königsberg University in 1840 at the age of 16. Between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia)and in Groß-Arnsdorf (now near Elbląg, Poland). Kant went on to become Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1770, at the age of 46. He never married.

He was a towering figure of the Enlightenment, influenced nearly all modern philosophers. In his writings, including his masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he argued that we can only truly know that which can be proven by evidence. He placed the active, rational human being at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. He suggested that we have a moral obligation, which he called the "categorical Imperative," to behave in an intrinsically good way under all circumstances -- not necessarily in ways that would make us happy, but in ways that would make us worthy of being happy. In his 1795 work Perpetual Peace, he quoted the Latin phrase "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus" ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"). He also criticized those who focused too much on religious ritual and church hierarchy as attempts to please the Creator without having to practice the actual principles of religion and righteousness.